You and I don't perhaps. But some of the elderly, inferm, or handicapped do. And potentially autonomous vehicles are far safer than human controlled vehicles. The problem looks to be how to debug the vehicles without killing or maiming half the population of the planet.
True Apple people have no need to travel. The world will come to them.
On a more serious note, I think those folks who claim elsewhere in these comments that you can't just plug a different SIM into one of these dual SIM Apple phones and go on your merry way are almost certainly wrong. Apple makes what seem to me really odd assumptions about what users want/need and I have always found their products to be overpriced and often pretty much unusable. But I doubt that their worldview is so peculiar that the desire of travellers to use country specific SIMs -- perhaps several in one day -- has escaped them.
What sort of people would want to "quickly change services"? Shifty, suspicious character those... criminals, spies, and the like. Obviously not people who aspire to Apple quality.
Let's see if I have this straight. It's 0313 on Sunday morning during the August holidays and the security guard -- the only living entity in the facility -- gets a call from some dude who claims to be European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and is told to remove a racist slogan from somewhere on some website. The ISP now has 1 hour to verify the call isn't a prank, identify the right file, trace through a bunch of obscure Javascript, and get the proper web site off the air. Riiiiiight. No problem there. What could possibly go wrong?
Don't know about anyone else, but I use gmail because of the excellent spam filtering. Do I use Google to read the mail? Of course not. Their mail stuff is slow, clunky, and very hard to use. Google supports imap/smtp, so I just read and send mail with Alpine. But I reckon a locally hosted GUI email program would work just as well.
Seems like GDPR compliance in the EU is likely to be a problem. I suspect that HIPAA compliance in the US might be a problem for medical data, but I don't know enough about HIPAA to be sure.
This really could be Microsoft's dumbest idea since the $@#%& Registry.
Let's don't forget that MIcrosoft has been known to (inadvertently one assumes) reset flags to their default values during updates. You might be able to set up a safe, useful configuration. Is it going to stay safe/useful?
"I'm a bit skeptical that Python has the necessary package/module system to support a clean architecture for large (hundreds of thousands of lines) enterprise grade software."
I think you're likely at least somewhat correct. Python scripts longer than a few hundred lines tend to be increasingly hard to navigate. There is a module system. But it's kind of clunky and confusing. I, at least, have never warmed to it. There has to be some solution used in really large Python systems, but I don't know what it is.
"It doesn't seem terrible but it's not a revelation either - a lot like Perl but with a cleaner object system."
Python creator Guido Von Rossum has been known to say that Python and Perl are pretty much the same language. My experience is that that's pretty much true when coding. In my (limited) experience the difference is that if I come back to the code more than a few hours after I write it, there's a fair chance I will be able to read the Python. Perl? It'll look like a random dump of characters and operators.
=========
To my mind, the two strengths of Python are:
It'll do whatever you want to do -- procedural logic, objects, functional programming -- in a reasonably sane and comprehensible manner.
Some of the built in types -- string, list, file -- have nice sets of methods that do what one wants to do pretty sensibly. One exception to that -- list methods act on the list and return an error flag rather than returning the modified list. a = [2,1,3]; b = a.sort(). You expect b to be [1,2,3]? Nope a is [1,2,3], b is None (operation successful). If you wanted b linked to the sorted list? you should have used the sorted function. b=sorted(a) I've never encountered a programming language that didn't have idiosyncracies. I think Python has fewer than most.
"Not when they care about performance they don't."
Of course not. But performance is (mostly) an engineering issue. Science tends to be more about getting answers at reasonable overall cost. Thus Python, MathLab and R.
"it's illegal to ride these things on the sidewalk"
Surely not everywhere and always. Someone ran a survey of the local laws in Vermont's 250 odd towns and cities. They found that in some it's illegal to ride bicycles on sidewalks (if you can find a sidewalk), in some it's optional, in some it's mandatory. I expect the same would be true of scooters.
What percentage of scooter injuries are concussions? I suspect not that many. On top of that with helmets, we will see a new problem -- pedestrian injuries caused by impact of helmets on pedestrians. There's a reason that America's National Football League is trying to reduce helmet contacts with other player's heads.
I'm not opposed to helmets, but maybe a design that is less menacing to innocent bystanders than the "standard" hard helmet...
It's my understanding that Segways are limited to fast walking speed -- 8mph (about 13kph) in order to minimize mayhem. Perhaps scooters should also be so so limited.
Were it easy to convert CO2 (plus Water incidentally) to sugar ( 6CO2 + 6H2O --> C6H12O6 + 6O2)), plants would probably do it more efficiently already. Really, what else do they have to do?
BTW, plants don't have to create glucose per. se.. Starch (Potatoes, Casava, Taro, etc) is easily broken down to glucose by adding a bit of hydrochloric acid.
"Perhaps they should start leading by example and fix what they helped create"
No argument that Google is one of the principle culprits in reducing the URL to a humongous quasi-random string of characters. But are you sure you want them to try to "fix" that. Other than a very good search engine and an excellent map data base, very little of the their product is very impressive. My guess is they will create something even worse and internet users will have yet another unnecessary problem to deal with.
Well... yes. As a practical matter, very little of the huge mass of software loose in the world is written to actual specifications. And the specifications that do exist are rarely as clear and unambiguous as one might hope. That's why even such apparently simple and straightforward entities as Markdown or media playlists have numerous variants and dialects. Without specifications, it is often impossible to build regression test suites that provide adequate coverage. As a result software is pretty much always a bit broken and requires fixes. Except that the fixes themselves are very likely to introduce new problems -- very often in areas logically remote from what is being fixed.
Thus, a fix for a minor display problem can, and occasionally does, break your email or cause your C-compiler to generate flawed code for some edge cases.
The obvious, and probably best, solution to this situation is fix only where there is no choice and to work around problems where possible rather than issue a continuous stream of sometimes flawed "fixes". But there are a lot of folks -- many of them not at all stupid -- to whom not fixing problems is an alien concept. When those folks are in charge -- and that happens a lot --The result is likely to be constant stumbling from crisis to crisis.
"Why does something that works ever need to be "upgraded"
Software that works. An interesting, but flawed concept. It's not compatible with maximizing profits. Fortunately, we have embraced modern software development technologies that make it exceedingly unlikely that software will ever actually work.
Keep the lights on? How 19th century. In California 2046 all humans will sleep 10-14 hours a night like God intended when she failed to give us multiple suns.
Sadly, that was quite true up 'til 1986 when Ford released a well built, well engineered family sedan -- the Taurus. The reason is simple. The US auto industry was firmly centered in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is built on an old lake bed, is flat as a billiard table, and the roads are pretty much all dead straight. There are some minor hills in the Western suburbs. But to experience a road that requires the driver to make an actual turn, you need to drive most of the way to Ann Arbor about 60 km to the West.
I genuinely don't think the designers in MoTown had the slightest idea what roads looked like on the coasts or in the mountain West.
"In summary, as long as you can make a sufficient number of right-hand turns.."
Generally true although it may not work in Boston.
Legend has it that notorious whackjob and FBI director J Edgar Hoover actually instructed his drivers never to make left turns. One of Hoover's biographies is entitled "No Left Turns"
I looked into this once. It turns out that there are standards for traffic control devices, but not every jurisdiction in North America adheres to them . There's at least one place -- I've forgotten where -- where a blinking red arrow means something like "Feel free to proceed, but be aware that there will shortly be a train occupying the space you are headed into if it isn't there already." (It's not always easy to see trains BTW -- especially at night. They paint some of the engines and cars black).
Anyway, it will probably be necessary to fix that sort of thing. Plus some situations where the traffic control devices for another nearby intersection are visible and easily confused with signals for an intersection.
First the Waymo software is likely a bit buggy. No surprise there. It'll take several years to work through that Wait til they encounter some of the blinking red and yellow arrows recently installed on traffic signals around here. I don't have the slightest idea what they really mean. Neither does anyone else.. Neither, I'll bet, will Waymo. On top of which at some times on some days, the sensors trying to read the signals will be looking directly into the sun.
Second, the Waymo cars try to drive safely and legally. Whereas human drivers generally try to drive as quickly as possible without being delayed by accidents or police traffic stops.
Third, I expect, is that autonomous vehicles in general are likely going to have trouble with some forms of bad weather -- especially heavy snow which humans who like to stay out o0f ditches handle by driving quite slowly and keeping moving. This is likely not going to be apparent in testing in Sunnyvale or Phoenix.
Slashdot Mirror
"We don't need driverless cars."
You and I don't perhaps. But some of the elderly, inferm, or handicapped do. And potentially autonomous vehicles are far safer than human controlled vehicles. The problem looks to be how to debug the vehicles without killing or maiming half the population of the planet.
One does get a bit nervous when confronted with capitalists begging to be regulated. Perhaps it's time to check our wallets and count the silverware.
True Apple people have no need to travel. The world will come to them.
On a more serious note, I think those folks who claim elsewhere in these comments that you can't just plug a different SIM into one of these dual SIM Apple phones and go on your merry way are almost certainly wrong. Apple makes what seem to me really odd assumptions about what users want/need and I have always found their products to be overpriced and often pretty much unusable. But I doubt that their worldview is so peculiar that the desire of travellers to use country specific SIMs -- perhaps several in one day -- has escaped them.
What sort of people would want to "quickly change services"? Shifty, suspicious character those ... criminals, spies, and the like. Obviously not people who aspire to Apple quality.
And devoid of user serviceable components. ... But available in any of seven designer colors.
Bogus nonsense? Tell us that the next time you need an infintesimally small magnetometer for some project.
Let's see if I have this straight. It's 0313 on Sunday morning during the August holidays and the security guard -- the only living entity in the facility -- gets a call from some dude who claims to be European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and is told to remove a racist slogan from somewhere on some website. The ISP now has 1 hour to verify the call isn't a prank, identify the right file, trace through a bunch of obscure Javascript, and get the proper web site off the air. Riiiiiight. No problem there. What could possibly go wrong?
Don't know about anyone else, but I use gmail because of the excellent spam filtering. Do I use Google to read the mail? Of course not. Their mail stuff is slow, clunky, and very hard to use. Google supports imap/smtp, so I just read and send mail with Alpine. But I reckon a locally hosted GUI email program would work just as well.
Seems like GDPR compliance in the EU is likely to be a problem. I suspect that HIPAA compliance in the US might be a problem for medical data, but I don't know enough about HIPAA to be sure.
This really could be Microsoft's dumbest idea since the $@#%& Registry.
Let's don't forget that MIcrosoft has been known to (inadvertently one assumes) reset flags to their default values during updates. You might be able to set up a safe, useful configuration. Is it going to stay safe/useful?
"I'm a bit skeptical that Python has the necessary package/module system to support a clean architecture for large (hundreds of thousands of lines) enterprise grade software."
I think you're likely at least somewhat correct. Python scripts longer than a few hundred lines tend to be increasingly hard to navigate. There is a module system. But it's kind of clunky and confusing. I, at least, have never warmed to it. There has to be some solution used in really large Python systems, but I don't know what it is.
"It doesn't seem terrible but it's not a revelation either - a lot like Perl but with a cleaner object system."
Python creator Guido Von Rossum has been known to say that Python and Perl are pretty much the same language. My experience is that that's pretty much true when coding. In my (limited) experience the difference is that if I come back to the code more than a few hours after I write it, there's a fair chance I will be able to read the Python. Perl? It'll look like a random dump of characters and operators.
=========
To my mind, the two strengths of Python are:
It'll do whatever you want to do -- procedural logic, objects, functional programming -- in a reasonably sane and comprehensible manner.
Some of the built in types -- string, list, file -- have nice sets of methods that do what one wants to do pretty sensibly. One exception to that -- list methods act on the list and return an error flag rather than returning the modified list. a = [2,1,3]; b = a.sort(). You expect b to be [1,2,3]? Nope a is [1,2,3], b is None (operation successful). If you wanted b linked to the sorted list? you should have used the sorted function. b=sorted(a) I've never encountered a programming language that didn't have idiosyncracies. I think Python has fewer than most.
"Not when they care about performance they don't."
Of course not. But performance is (mostly) an engineering issue. Science tends to be more about getting answers at reasonable overall cost. Thus Python, MathLab and R.
"it's illegal to ride these things on the sidewalk"
Surely not everywhere and always. Someone ran a survey of the local laws in Vermont's 250 odd towns and cities. They found that in some it's illegal to ride bicycles on sidewalks (if you can find a sidewalk), in some it's optional, in some it's mandatory. I expect the same would be true of scooters.
What percentage of scooter injuries are concussions? I suspect not that many. On top of that with helmets, we will see a new problem -- pedestrian injuries caused by impact of helmets on pedestrians. There's a reason that America's National Football League is trying to reduce helmet contacts with other player's heads.
I'm not opposed to helmets, but maybe a design that is less menacing to innocent bystanders than the "standard" hard helmet ...
It's my understanding that Segways are limited to fast walking speed -- 8mph (about 13kph) in order to minimize mayhem. Perhaps scooters should also be so so limited.
Were it easy to convert CO2 (plus Water incidentally) to sugar ( 6CO2 + 6H2O --> C6H12O6 + 6O2)), plants would probably do it more efficiently already. Really, what else do they have to do?
BTW, plants don't have to create glucose per. se.. Starch (Potatoes, Casava, Taro, etc) is easily broken down to glucose by adding a bit of hydrochloric acid.
"Perhaps they should start leading by example and fix what they helped create"
No argument that Google is one of the principle culprits in reducing the URL to a humongous quasi-random string of characters. But are you sure you want them to try to "fix" that. Other than a very good search engine and an excellent map data base, very little of the their product is very impressive. My guess is they will create something even worse and internet users will have yet another unnecessary problem to deal with.
Well ... yes. As a practical matter, very little of the huge mass of software loose in the world is written to actual specifications. And the specifications that do exist are rarely as clear and unambiguous as one might hope. That's why even such apparently simple and straightforward entities as Markdown or media playlists have numerous variants and dialects. Without specifications, it is often impossible to build regression test suites that provide adequate coverage. As a result software is pretty much always a bit broken and requires fixes. Except that the fixes themselves are very likely to introduce new problems -- very often in areas logically remote from what is being fixed.
Thus, a fix for a minor display problem can, and occasionally does, break your email or cause your C-compiler to generate flawed code for some edge cases.
The obvious, and probably best, solution to this situation is fix only where there is no choice and to work around problems where possible rather than issue a continuous stream of sometimes flawed "fixes". But there are a lot of folks -- many of them not at all stupid -- to whom not fixing problems is an alien concept. When those folks are in charge -- and that happens a lot --The result is likely to be constant stumbling from crisis to crisis.
"Why does something that works ever need to be "upgraded"
Software that works. An interesting, but flawed concept. It's not compatible with maximizing profits. Fortunately, we have embraced modern software development technologies that make it exceedingly unlikely that software will ever actually work.
Keep the lights on? How 19th century. In California 2046 all humans will sleep 10-14 hours a night like God intended when she failed to give us multiple suns.
As opposed to the US where we've repeatedly had a choice between two truly awful candidates.
If you aren't going to let idiots drive, the western economies going to experience a huge readjustment.
Sadly, that was quite true up 'til 1986 when Ford released a well built, well engineered family sedan -- the Taurus. The reason is simple. The US auto industry was firmly centered in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is built on an old lake bed, is flat as a billiard table, and the roads are pretty much all dead straight. There are some minor hills in the Western suburbs. But to experience a road that requires the driver to make an actual turn, you need to drive most of the way to Ann Arbor about 60 km to the West.
I genuinely don't think the designers in MoTown had the slightest idea what roads looked like on the coasts or in the mountain West.
"In summary, as long as you can make a sufficient number of right-hand turns .."
Generally true although it may not work in Boston.
Legend has it that notorious whackjob and FBI director J Edgar Hoover actually instructed his drivers never to make left turns. One of Hoover's biographies is entitled "No Left Turns"
I looked into this once. It turns out that there are standards for traffic control devices, but not every jurisdiction in North America adheres to them . There's at least one place -- I've forgotten where -- where a blinking red arrow means something like "Feel free to proceed, but be aware that there will shortly be a train occupying the space you are headed into if it isn't there already." (It's not always easy to see trains BTW -- especially at night. They paint some of the engines and cars black).
Anyway, it will probably be necessary to fix that sort of thing. Plus some situations where the traffic control devices for another nearby intersection are visible and easily confused with signals for an intersection.
OK ... So we have several problems
First the Waymo software is likely a bit buggy. No surprise there. It'll take several years to work through that Wait til they encounter some of the blinking red and yellow arrows recently installed on traffic signals around here. I don't have the slightest idea what they really mean. Neither does anyone else.. Neither, I'll bet, will Waymo. On top of which at some times on some days, the sensors trying to read the signals will be looking directly into the sun.
Second, the Waymo cars try to drive safely and legally. Whereas human drivers generally try to drive as quickly as possible without being delayed by accidents or police traffic stops.
Third, I expect, is that autonomous vehicles in general are likely going to have trouble with some forms of bad weather -- especially heavy snow which humans who like to stay out o0f ditches handle by driving quite slowly and keeping moving. This is likely not going to be apparent in testing in Sunnyvale or Phoenix.